QuestionnaireSmarter than ever?Over the past century, the average IQ in industrialized countries has risen to keep pace with thecomplexity of modern life. IQ researcher James Flynn discusses why those gains have occurred andwhether they are likely to continue.

BY LEA WINERMAN

Monitor staff

Over the past 100 years, Americans’ mean IQ has been on a slow but
steady climb. Between 1900 and 2012, it
rose nearly 30 points, which means that
the average person of 2012 had a higher
IQ than 95 percent of the population
had in 1900.

Political scientist James Flynn, PhD, ofthe University of Otago in New Zealand,first discovered those astonishing IQgains nearly 30 years ago. Since then, thesteady rise in IQ scores in the UnitedStates and throughout the developedworld has been dubbed the “Flynn effect.”In his new book “Are We GettingSmarter?” Flynn discusses the origins ofhis eponymous effect and muses on itsimplications for the economic prospectsof the developing world, how we nurtureour children and even its impact ondeath-row inmates.

Flynn spoke to the Monitor about his
work.

How did you first discover thatIQs were rising?I started investigating IQ scores in the1980s. I was interested in the correlationbetween U.S. military intelligence testsand mainline IQ tests. But when Ilooked at the scoring manuals I noticedsomething striking. Often, to makesure that the correlation co-efficientswere the same between, let’s say, theWechsler Intelligence Scale for Children,published in 1949, and the revisedversion published in 1974, researcherswould give the same group of subjectsboth tests. And it turned out that inevery instance, the earlier tests gave thesubjects higher IQs than the later tests.

Next in line are usually the Wechsler
performance tests — they go up at about
four points a decade — and then finally
the verbal tests rise at about two or three
points a decade.

What has caused these changes?

Well, everything about the modern
world has changed since 1900, as you
can imagine.

The three things that stand out are:
first, formal schooling. That clearly
has to be involved in the huge gains in
vocabulary and general information
we see in America since 1950 —
vocabulary subtests of the IQ tests
have risen by 17 points over those
50 years. If you project that back to
1900, a period for which we don’t
have adequate data, that would be 34
points, or two standard deviations. So
that’s a lot of vocabulary. It means that
people today on average know enough
vocabulary to mimic the speech of only
the cultural elite of 1900.

The second factor is what Alexander
Luria discovered when he tested rural
Russian peasants in the 1930s. He
discovered that pre-scientific people
can’t take the hypothetical seriously.
That is, if you pose to them questions
like, “There is snow at the North Pole;
where there is snow, bears are white;
what color are bears at the North
Pole?” they would say, “Well, I’ve
only seen brown bears. And only if a
person came from the North Pole with